Roswell

On or around Independence Day, 1947, during a severe thunderstorm near Roswell, New
Mexico, an Air Force experiment using high altitude balloons blew apart and fell to the
earth. This minor event in the history of reconnaissance turned out to be the Big Bang of
UFOlogy. UFO enthusiasts have come to see that 4th of July as the day an alien spaceship
crashed on Earth. Some UFOlogists claim that aliens were taken away by the U.S. Air
Force and other government coconspirators for an interrogation or an autopsy. Some claim
that all our modern technology was learned by analyzing and copying the technology of the
aliens.

The actual crash site was on the Foster ranch 75 miles north of Roswell, a small town doing a big business feeding the insatiable
appetite of UFO enthusiasts. Roswell has a UFO museum,
The International Museum &
Research Center, and hosts an
annual alien
festival. Shops cater to this curious tourist trade, much as Inverness caters to the Loch
Ness crowd. This seems a bit unfair to Corona, New Mexico, which is actually the
closest town to the alleged crash site. Roswell is the nearest military base,
however, and that is where the remains of the alien craft and its occupants were
allegedly taken. Why the aliens were not taken to a superior medical facility remains a
mystery.

William "Mack" Brazel, foreman of the Foster Ranch, along
with 7-year-old Dee Proctor found the most famous debris in modern history. They
had never seen anything like it before. Millions now agree: the stuff was strange.
Actually, it was pretty mundane stuff, including a piece of reinforcing tape whose flower-like
design was taken to be alien hieroglyphics. But the Air Force was not consistent in
describing the debris and has suggested that
ardent UFOlogists have had a little trouble with their source memory. Perhaps what people
are recalling as a single event is actually a mixture of several events that occurred in different
years (such as weather balloon and nuclear explosion detection balloon tests, airplane
crashes with burned bodies, and dumping of featureless dummies from airplanes). The
likelihood that Roswell is a reconstruction involving many events over many years is
supported by the fact that Roswell was ignored by UFOlogists until Charles Berlitz
and William Moore published a book on the subject in 1980, more than thirty
years after the event.

The National Enquirer also brought Roswell to the forefront in
1980 with a story featuring Jesse Marcel, the Army Major who, in 1947 may
have been responsible for a press release that claimed our military had
possession of parts of a flying disk, the kind that
Kenneth Arnold had
reported seeing just a couple of weeks earlier. (Others say the press
release came from Walter Haut.) Roswell was one of hundreds
of such "sightings" reported shortly after the news media spread the word of
Arnold's "flying saucers." The success of the movie Close Encounters of
the Third Kind (1977) probably also contributed to the atmosphere that
led to the rising of Roswell like the Phoenix from alien ashes to the top of
the UFO myth list some three decades after the alleged fact.

UFO buffs trust Berlitz and others with fantastic stories based on
30-year-old memories. That the government made errors and was inconsistent
is taken as sufficient evidence that there is a massive conspiracy by the
government and mass media. They are trying to conceal the truth from the
general public that the aliens have landed. Some even believe that the
U.S. government has signed a treaty with the aliens.

Skeptics agree that something crashed near Roswell in 1947, but not an alien craft.
Skeptical explanations have varied from weather balloons to secret aircraft to espionage
devices. Current conventional wisdom among skeptics is that what was found on the
Foster ranch was part of Project Mogul, a top secret project testing giant, high-flying
balloons to detect Soviet nuclear explosions.

To skeptics, Roswell is a classic example of what D.H. Rawcliffe called retrospective falsification. An extraordinary story is
told, then retold with embellishments and remodeled with favorable points emphasized
while unfavorable ones are dropped. False witnesses put in their two cents,
such as mortician Glen Dennis
(Gildenberg 2003). In the case of
Roswell, we also have a few unreliable characters who add their delusions, such as
Whitley Strieber, Budd Hopkins and John Mack (see the alien
abduction entry). There is also Robert Spencer Carr, the high school graduate who
liked to be called "Professor Carr." Carr is a hero in the UFO literature, but
his stories of flying saucers and alien creatures were all delusions. His son has written:
"I am so very sorry that my father's pathological prevarication has turned out to be
the foundation on which such a monstrous mountain of falsehoods has been heaped"
(Carr 1997). It
was that mountain of falsehoods that became part of the UFO memory, fixating conviction in
a remarkable tale. It happened at Fatima (during a time when the only aliens thought to be
visiting our planet were messengers from some god) and it happened at Roswell. One might think,
however, that unlike the belief in our Lady of Fatima and other apparitions
from the supernatural world, Roswell might be settled some day since it involves testable
hypotheses and refutable claims. Don't count on it. UFO enthusiasts are every bit as
devoted to their belief system as religious devotees are to theirs. Evidence and rational
argument are of little concern to those who consider science fiction to be a wiser guide
than science, logic and reasonable probability.